Each local voting location prints out its own ballot results. These are available to any local who wants to see them. Independent analyzers are putting together photos of these print-outs right now to try to confirm or challenge the results as we speak. As in the US, independent citizens volunteer to run and oversee these ballot locations. It would be impossible for Maduro to "permanently [hide] local election tallies"
This form of analysis has been used to verify the validity of past election results. All were within 2 points of forecasts based on this data.
We still don't have enough results to do this type of analysis yet, but we surely will eventually. The group that did the analysis you're linking is AltaVista. They are linked with the opposition, but their same analysis validated past results. Their current analysis obviously doesn't but they also admit that their sample is biased towards anti-Maduro centers.
My main point in responding to GP was to point out that it'd be impossible for Maduro to prevent this type of independent analysis
> Their current analysis obviously doesn't but they also admit that their sample is biased towards anti-Maduro centers.
If that's true, 81% of the total would already be quite representative (and less subject to be biased by anti-Maduro constituencies being overrrepresented)
These are forecasts based on pictures of ballot tallies. And this website is made by the opposition. I'm not saying they're wrong, I just think it's silly to take their word for it instead of just waiting until we have more data and these results have been looked over by independent parties
It's very unclear what you're trying to say here. Nobody is talking about a forecasted 100%-of-returns outcome. They're talking about the 80%-of-returns number that the ECN announced.
How did Astavista gather these records? If they are submitted by the voters and if the research group is opposition funded, it could very well be that more opposition voters submitted? Genuine question because this is such a huge discrepancy and surely if its true, Maduro can't get away with it and he must know.
The electoral system in Venezuela mandates electronic voting. By law, each machine must print its results before sending the tally to a central server.
Multiple copies are printed. One goes to the CNE, another goes to the military, and several others are given to witnesses representing different political parties.
Each copy must be signed by all the witnesses, including the representative from the CNE.
The opposition candidate gathered as much as 80% of the total printouts and made them available for everyone to see and analyze.
Printouts can be validated because the result is digitally signed with a key that is known to the political parties and other organizations. The signature is at the end of each printout.
So, thanks to that I've been able to check the "acta de escrutinio" of the El Carmen paroquia...
That indeed looks plausible, but do we have any Venezuelan here that can corroborate that this website shows the same "acta de escrutinio" that locals can request from their polling station?
I mean, allegedly this is a grassroots effort with all of the acta painstakingly aggregated... But the website is controlled by the opposition, so they could've just been made up (just like the numbers from CNE could be made up)
Do you have any details about the kind of mechanism that they used?
If it's a private/public kind of mechanism, they should be able to disclose the public key for signature verification.
If it's not, and it's some kind of a HMAC, and the political parties have all access to the key... Then this doesn't protect at all against the threat implied (the different parties don't trust each other, and both claim that they are trying to "steal" the election), since these signatures could be forged by any of the political parties with access to the key
Even in the former case, it could be possible that a machine could be compromised, and could have emitted two tallies (one for the actual election, and another one with different numbers and forged signatures). In that case, we would still want to check that the local polling station can confirm that the Acta that we're seeing is congruent with what they have
I also agree the parties should disclose the public key and the parameters to calculate the hash.
The code and the keys are stored in a database that is audited by political parties before the election. What I’m not certain about is whether they have access to it at this time.
Proving the validity of the acts should be trivial, especially for any party who had access to the audited database. There is little point in forging fake ones.
The locals probably can’t request shit because those records are in custody of the military.
Many Venezuelan people have verified their records. Including the “witnesses” who have signed all the records. The signatures can be seen on the pictures.
There’s nothing stopping anyone from doing OCR on the images to extract the count and just do the math. (Which is what I am doing but not as easy as it sounds)
There is no need to do any difficult OCR, the QR code contains the tally in machine-readable format. You just need a phone and copy the result to a csv file
> Many Venezuelan people have verified their records. Including the “witnesses” who have signed all the records. The signatures can be seen on the pictures
The thing is that these witness signatures could be forged (together with the tallies)
I assume that with "verified their records" you mean exactly what I'm asking for (but since I don't know any Venezuelan living in Venezuela, I haven't seen anyone verifying that stuff)
You could make a public spreadsheet so others can join in on the crowdsourced effort
Just make a list of every precinct and whether or not we have a screenshot for them. People can help by uploading more pictures and which precinct it corresponds to and also manually reading the results and updating the spreadsheet
I was able to follow their guide to scrape the resultadosconvzla.com website, and ended up with ~22,000 JPGs of receipts. A random sampling of them shows that, for the most part, they contain no actual inked signatures and/or fingerprints that would be present on the receipts signed by the poll workers. Some of the receipts do have signatures and/or fingerprints, but not most of them. Most of them look like this:
I.e., it looks like they asked a voting machine to print out a receipt, and it did. Then, they scanned the receipt in and put it online. The important part though, where individual poll workers scattered across hundreds of stations all over the country all sign their receipts in ink, for comparison against the computerized signatures gathered beforehand, does not appear to have happened for most of the receipts that the opposition has in possession.
I'm frustrated that the Maduro government has released highly improbable numbers. And I'm frustrated that it (certainly appears that) the opposition doesn't have nearly as much validated data as they claim to have. My gut tells me that the CNE got hacked, that the results are thus untrustworthy, and that they'll need to re-run the election, preferably by pen and paper. But the Maduro administration didn't want to face up to that fact and so, made up numbers instead -__-
As is explained in detail here: https://x.com/i/broadcasts/1YpKklRpzAyGj
The signatures on the Actas are digital, not ink. The testigos sign on the voting machine's screen. The machine will print out the receipt once the witnesses agree to the electronic count against their tallies of the individual paper votes. After printing, the machine goes online to transmit the electronic results, which can always be audited by the physical results.
What's more likely, that the opposition forged tens of thousands of receipts in less than a day, or a dictator reported fake results to remain in power? Receipts, mind you, copies of which are given to each witness from the top-three political parties, at any point now could have been called into question but not a single counter example has been shown.
Please don't drink their "North Macedonia" hack kool-aid.
>The signatures on the Actas are digital, not ink.
Yes, each acta has a digital signature, gathered ahead of time. It is there to compare against the inked signatures signed by the members of the mesa, after confirmation that the sampled ballots converge toward the computer's results. The ballots are the source of truth here, not what the computer receipt says. And the link between the ballots and the receipt are the inked signatures (or fingerprints) of the members of the mesa.
>What's more likely, that the opposition forged tens of thousands of receipts in less than a day, or a dictator reported fake results to remain in power?
The opposition need not have been the one to hack the machines. A third party could have done that. And again, the opposition haven't released "forged" receipts, merely receipts that have not actually been certified. How they have obtained those receipts is an open question at this point.
>Receipts, mind you, copies of which are given to each witness from the top-three political parties, at any point now could have been called into question but not a single counter example has been shown.
90% of their receipts lack any inked certification from the presidents, secretaries, members, witnesses, or operators of the mesas on the ground. That should be garnering an enormous amount of skepticism from a crowd that is normally adamant about not trusting computers during elections.
